Friday, December 23, 2011

The Salsa Cycles Mukluk Ti is coming together, slow but sure, and most of the parts to build it up are in, or being prepared to be installed.

Here you can see my "one of the last ones" Chris King head set in purple. Looks mighty fine on there, no? I did forget to order a new crown race, so that will get done post-Christmas. You can also see the nice re-enforcement rings on each end of the head tube here too.

The front end will also be graced by that Surly rear single speed hub in purple ano, which should bring a little "pop" to the bike in terms of color. Most of my components will be grey or black, so a few points of color will make the bike visually more stimulating. (At least I think so!)

One question came up earlier in the comments, and it had to do with the fork. I gave a lot of thought to switching the fork over to a White Brothers Snow Pack fork, but in the end there were a few considerations that made me choose to stick with the Enabler Fork instead. Here they are....

The White Brothers fork is made to accept a front hub disc brake mount standard. This means you have to use a 135OLD front specific hub, like the Jones, Paul WHUB, or a couple of others. That also means that the wheel one builds for such a fork is dedicated to that fork only. Kind of limiting when you already have a fat bike with a rear hub standard front hub.

Another thing about the White Brothers fork is that it is a "one trick pony". It holds a front wheel, and that is all. No mounts for anything. The Enabler can do racks, water bottles, or the versatile Anything Cage. It also has fender mounts!

The White Brothers fork is very expensive, and only saves about a half pound of weight.

When taken in aggregate, the choice became obvious to me. Use the Enabler fork!

Moar puuuurple!

Here you go- a look at the seat post clamp. I swapped out the provided pewter clamp for this, more eye catching one, and again- it will tie into the purple theme. Three purple parts hardly makes a "Barney-bike" outta this, but it does give the bike less of a "grey scale" look had I stuck with black components.

Here also you see a glimpse of the FSA seat post from the SLK series. The unidirectional carbon fiber does catch the light and makes for some more visually stimulating places for the eye to rest on here. I was a bit anxious about this post, as it is only a 350mm one and needs 100mm of that inserted into the seat tube. At minimum insertion, I am just at my proper seat height with the WTB SST saddle.

Granted- I could go with a saddle that had a higher profile than the SST, or I could get 180mm cranks, or do both, and get a bit more insertion, but as it is, it should work! If it doesn't, I have a 12K weave Origin 8 carbon post waiting in the wings that is longer. Come to think of it, I've got an old uni-directional carbon Tamer post somewhere too. (Remember those?)

Chain guide, DH Platinum FSA BB

Finally, we have this shot showing the FSA Platinum DH ISIS bottom bracket in the 100mm shell width, of course. The set up I will be using is a "1 X" set up, so without a front derailleur, I needed a chain guide. In with the MRP part seen here, which should tame any unwanted chain jump and keep my chain on the chain wheel.

The crank set and ring will be an older Bontrager crank, the very one I used on the Snow Dog at first, set up with a Salsa Cycles chain ring.

The reasons for this set up come from my experiences on The Snow Dog. I rarely if ever used anything but the middle ring riding everywhere I did this past year. I almost never used the two largest cogs on the cassette- a 32 and a 36T- and that leads me to believe that for most of my riding, this 1X10 set up should do me just right around the Mid-West.

This also allows me to fine tune the gearing a bit with chain ring sizes, but I think most of the time I will be using a 32T or a 34T front ring. This also makes tire clearances a non-issue with respect to ever using 100mm rims and the largest tires. (I don't necessarily plan to run rims that big, but I could.)

The crank spec could also change here at some point to a White Industries 180mm and then I would use a Phil Wood bottom bracket. This would look cooler, be a shade lighter, and be better for the aforementioned seat post insertion and single speeding.

I also may swap in a granny gear on the Bontrager crank at times for mountain rock crawling, at which point I will need to get an XT high direct mount front derailleur, but that can wait.

very nice bike gted im doing something similiar with my fargo ti but doing it in blue the whole fat bike trend is very interesting to me esp from a design/engineering aspect when it comes gearing and tire selection btw i guess im not the only one who thinks fatbikes ride like a magic carpet ride